


‘I called in some favors from Kiev,’ or Arnim Zola and the origins of the MCU Winter Soldier

by Aegir



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Essay, Gen, Meta, SHIELD history, Winter Soldier history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 20:07:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3460307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegir/pseuds/Aegir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An essay considering what happened to Bucky Barnes after he fell from the train, how Arnim Zola might have got his hands on Sergeant Barnes again, and why the Winter Soldier’s file comes from Kiev and not Moscow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	‘I called in some favors from Kiev,’ or Arnim Zola and the origins of the MCU Winter Soldier

**Author's Note:**

> This is discussing the creation of the Winter Soldier. If you are in this fandom I'm sure you know what to expect.
> 
> There are some spoilers for the Agent Carter series below

This is where I take a look at the question of what happened to MCU Bucky Barnes after he fell from the train, and just who turned him into the Winter Soldier. A lot of this is speculative, and may yet be disproved, but there’s some really interesting pointers I haven’t seen discussed yet.

The answer implied in the movie is that SHIELDRA created the Winter Soldier, more specifically Arnim Zola did it during the time he was on SHIELD’s payroll. During Bucky’s flashbacks in the movie there are flashes of what appear to be his flesh arm being amputated, then him seeing his metal arm for the first time, accompanied by a voiceover of Zola saying _The procedure has already started. You are to be the new fist of HYDRA._ At this point it seems Bucky still has his memories, because the first thing he does with the arm is to throttle a scientist, but when Zola’s voice says _Put him on ice_ and we see him staring at his own reflection in the cyro chamber he looks confused, as though he doesn’t know who this man is.

Implication: Zola put the arm on. Zola developed the mind wipes. Admittedly Bucky’s memories are confused, since he seems to see Zola immediately after the train fall, where Zola couldn’t possibly have been, but there would be no point in having the Zola voiceover in those scenes at all, if the intention wasn’t to tell the audience that Zola created the Winter Soldier. And we know Zola was a Swiss Nazi who was recruited by the US government as part of Operation Paperclip, and who pretended to work for them while really working for HYDRA. So the only way it makes sense for Bucky to have got from being found by soldiers in Soviet style uniform in the snow to being operated on by a HYDRA scientist officially working for the USA in the USA is if the soldiers were HYDRA in Soviet garb. If the Winter Soldier was created by Zola, then he was always HYDRA.

Usefully the Captain America writers have now confirmed that’s what they meant in an interview given to coincide with the _Agent Carter_ season finale. [1]

_MARKUS: It’s a bit of a convoluted timeline in that in the first Captain America, Zola was captured in the same mission where Bucky fell off the train. Theoretically, a division of Hydra—possibly a Russian division of Hydra—went and got the body while Zola was in custody. Zola had already done something to Bucky, and experimented on him that made him beyond human, which allowed him to survive the fall and make him worth doing the research on. They kept him in stasis until Zola was able to have a little bit of freedom from the American government, at which point he maybe brought his new friend Johann Fennhoff to handle the mind control part of the Winter Soldier project._

_MCFEELY: That’s how we see it. I’m not positive that is gospel at the moment, but that’s how we sleep at night._

The phrase _possibly a Russian division_ sounds on the surface as though the writers haven’t put much thought into this part, but I think there’s a strong likelihood that they do have a thought out backstory, they’ve just chosen not to set it in stone. Because here we get to something interesting. There’s a fannish tendency to use ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ interchangeably. But when Natasha gives Steve the Winter Soldier file at the end she tells him it comes from Kiev. **And Kiev is not in Russia**. Kiev is the capital of the Ukraine.

It’s also not the only time the Winter Soldier is placed in the Ukraine. Natasha’s previous encounter with the Soldier was near Odessa, which is in a currently disputed area, but around 2009 when the encounter happened we’re talking Ukrainian territory. Now the Odessa reference by itself wouldn’t mean much, I’m sure the Winter Soldier got around, but put it together with the Kiev reference and it means there’s a pattern here, the writers didn’t just say ‘Kiev’ instead of ‘Moscow’ because they don’t care about European geography.

Reinforcing that, I found an online translation of the front page of the file, unfortunately I can’t find the link again now, but noted it as follows.

_KGB DIRECTORATE FOR DNIPROPETROVSK REGION_

_Special Division_

_File #17 / Vol. 2_

_James Barnes_

_Military record of maintenance, deployment and experimentation_

_Date opened: March 23, 1945_

_Date closed: ________, 19___

_Number of pages: 189_

_Registration number: TE-0623_

 

Now Marvel’s record with written information on visual props in this film isn’t great, see the Smithsonian board managing to give Bucky two contradictory birthdates. That said, there’s one thing that leaps out here and that’s the place name Dnipropetrovsk. Dnipropetrovsk is a province in the central Ukraine. Unlike Kiev and Odessa it’s not a name most non-Ukrainian people would be likely to know off the top of their head, so it looks like someone did a bit of research here. And even if the research was only two minutes on Google, it must have been research looking for placenames in the Ukraine. It’s all pointing in the same direction.

Why the Ukraine? I think the answer is that a Ukrainian HYDRA unit operating in 1944/5 is more likely than a Russian HYDRA unit. Ukraine was, of course, part of the old USSR, but there was a strong independence movement and a lot of Ukrainians really hated Stalin. (Ironically Stalin himself was not Russian, he came from Georgia.) Some of them as a result took a ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ attitude to the Nazis. It should be said these were a relatively small minority even among the nationalists, most Ukrainians resisted the German invasion fiercely, nonetheless there were some Ukrainian units fighting for Hitler, and it follows there could have been some fighting for Red Skull. Either they’d gone completely over to HYDRA but were still using Soviet Style uniforms, or they remained nominally affiliated to the USSR, while secretly working for HYDRA. [2] The KGB reference on the Winter Soldier’s file would suggest the latter.

I’d assume that the soldiers either deduced Sergeant Barnes had a version of the serum because he’d survived a fall of several hundred feet, or they had been alerted by Zola just before he was arrested on the train. In support of the second possibility, the movie takes care to establish that Zola can see what happens in the train car fight through cameras, and later when Phillips in the interrogation scene says _The last guy you cost us was Captain Rogers’ closest friend_ Zola gives a very slight smirk, as if he knows something Phillips doesn’t. Zola of course was the one person who certainly knew Bucky Barnes was enhanced and could have survived the fall. Depending on what experiments he’d done, he may even have known Bucky could survive freezing. Since Zola was in custody, the soldiers likely took Bucky back to the Ukraine and kept him frozen most or all of the time until Zola had got himself well established at SHIELD and was in a position to resume his experiments, then shipped him to the US. When Zola says _Put him on ice_ , that’s the tone you’d use for a tried and tested expedient, not a new one you’re not sure will work.

I’d further assume that after Zola had put the arm on and perfected the mind wipe process the decision was taken to ship the Winter Soldier back to Europe. Too much risk of recognition in the US even with the mask. Plus it seems Zola (or Fennhoff) was unable to make the programming fully stable, probably it was hoped the mind wipes wouldn’t be needed as often if he was in a completely unfamiliar environment. It wouldn’t be necessary to send him back to the same HYDRA group that had captured him after the fall from the train, but it would be the simplest thing to do, and the new HYDRA being a secret undercover organisation probably preferred to limit information within its own ranks. Alternatively maybe his being returned to the Ukraine when Zola had finished was a condition of his being sent to the US in the first place; Ukrainian HYDRA wouldn’t necessarily be taking orders from Zola. So he was shipped back to the Ukraine, and probably stayed based there until at least 2009, although I would assume he was on call for HYDRA jobs elsewhere when required.

He says a couple of sentences in Russian in the film, but that isn’t evidence he was ever based in Russia. Ukraine has a politically significant Russian speaking minority and was ruled from Moscow down to 1991, so it’s entirely probable he would have learned Russian while based in the Ukraine. And the internet also informs me that Russian is the dominant language in urban Dnipropetrovsk, the place name on the front of the file, which accounts for the file being in (I think) Russian. I assume he would speak Ukrainian as well, the two languages are closely related and I understand have some degree of mutual intelligibility so it wouldn’t be hard to learn both, especially if the supersoldier serum enhanced his learning abilities. (I also understand, though I wouldn’t know myself, that the Russian lines are actually bad Russian, which is probably production carelessness but could be explained as his not having learned Russian all that well because he wasn’t based in Russia.)

To go back to the file for a minute, another thing I found on the internet was identification of the letter in the front page of the file. The letter, it turns out, wasn’t created for the film, it’s a real historical document available online, and therefore of course not about the Winter Soldier.[3] It is however from the Ukraine, and one of the words visible on screen is Lviv, which is another Ukrainian province name, so the choice of that letter suggests determination to keep the evidence pointing to the Ukraine. Furthermore the full letter is a record of a KGB ‘investigation’ into the activities of Ukrainian units recruited by the Nazis, you can’t tell that from what’s onscreen, but it’s an interesting choice, and confirms someone working on the film was aware of that particular chapter of history. [4]  

Finally the photograph of Bucky in uniform. I think that’s probably from his SSR file, which HYDRA would have had access to after their infiltration of SHIELD. It’s been pointed out that the background is from the Stark Expo, which I think is probably just lazy photoshopping, but even running with that I think the most likely people to have been taking photos of Howard Stark’s audience – not photos of Stark’s inventions but of the people showing interest in those inventions – are the SSR.

Obviously there’s a bit of flexibility built in. It seems Doctor Fennhoff wasn’t intended to be part of the story until the Agent Carter series was developed, and we can only guess at what happened to Fennhoff after Zola’s recruitment pitch. Since Fennhoff seems to have been purely interested in personal revenge, rather than having any loyalty to Leviathan as an organisation, it makes sense he’d join anyone who offered that. However although I can see Peggy or Howard convincing themselves Zola was a weak-minded sidekick with no initiative of his own who was therefore safe to employ, I can’t see them allowing Fennhoff into SHIELD after getting a graphic demonstration of why letting him loose in your covert agency is a very, very bad idea. More likely once HYDRA had regrouped Zola arranged for Fennhoff to be busted out so they could work on the Winter Soldier project in secret.

So what about the red star? Well if we accept the information on the file the Soldier must have been installed in a Ukrainian branch of the KGB that had been thoroughly infiltrated by HYDRA. To at least some extent though I think the star is HYDRA sleight of hand, in the same way that Pierce’s use of Russian speaking muscle and HYDRA issuing Soviet ammo to the Soldier long after the fall of the USSR are obvious examples of deliberate misdirection.   When Computer Zola tells Steve and Natasha that _history was changed_ we see what looks like a newspaper image of the Soldier with the star clearly visible. We can assume the star would not have been seen unless HYDRA wanted it to be seen, he has the arm covered in the first attack on Fury. The star was there to be seen, to fuel Cold War paranoia. HYDRA wanted that hit to look like a Soviet kill, whether or not it was ordered by a Soviet official.

Not that the star doesn’t have a symbolic significance, beyond simply being a nod to the comics. The MCU Winter Soldier is a Cold War metaphor among other things, but he’s not just a metaphor about **Soviet** brutality. He’s a metaphor about how both sides used some really horrible tactics and employed some really horrible people, until from certain perspectives there could seem precious little to choose between them. To Bucky Barnes, tortured, violated, stripped of his identity, it makes no difference whether he’s in the Ukraine or the USA. The cycle of horror is the same, the orders are the same, only the language they are given in is different.   SHIELD, founded to protect the world, is barely distinguishable from the people it claims to be protecting the world from. In an earlier interview the writers stated they didn’t include Aleksandr Lukin, an important figure in the Winter Soldier’s history in the comics, in the film because they wanted Captain America to have to take a long, hard look at his own country, and not be able to place all the blame on an evil Russian. [5] So Aleksandr Lukin became Alexander Pierce – no way the same first name is a coincidence.

I don’t know that we’ll ever see the Ukrainian connection spelled out. Marvel want to sell their films all over the world, issues of who did and didn’t side with the Nazis are still hugely sensitive in Europe, Marvel probably don’t want to be accused of portraying the Ukraine as a hotbed of Nazi collaborationism. As I’ve said the Nazi collaborators were a small minority, but if Marvel openly direct attention to their existence while ignoring the fierce Ukrainian resistance to Hitler it could certainly cause offence.   Marvel may even decide to retcon the evidence for the Winter Soldier having been based in the Ukraine, especially if they want to include Bucky in a Black Widow movie, although that’s not looking too likely at present. But I believe the indications are there is indeed a thought out back story for the MCU Winter Soldier.

 

**Notes**

[1] To be found here <http://www.ew.com/article/2015/02/25/captain-america-writers-surprise-agent-carter-cameo>

[2] Take a look at Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko, one of the Ukrainian generals who led Ukrainian units fighting for the Germans here <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykhailo_Omelianovych-Pavlenko>

[3] <http://sabacc.tumblr.com/post/96173157887/mystery-revealed-as-a-roundup-for-this-tag-of> to see it

[4] Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see _Agent Carter_ , but from online transcripts and reviews it seems the fifth episode carefully establishes the Leviathan facility is in Belarus, then has the characters use ‘Belarus’ and ‘Russia’ interchangeably for the rest of the episode. Since the writers have clearly done their geography homework (the facility is precisely located in an area that would have been Soviet territory in the thirties, when western Belarus was part of Poland) I assume they do know Belarus and Russia were separate republics within the USSR, but are having the characters use ‘Russia’ loosely to mean ‘ruled from Moscow.’ I think there’s probably no political significance here, the writers just wanted a location close to the Polish border so their characters can get in and out quickly and Russia doesn’t border on Poland. As this is 1946 the characters really should have used ‘Byelorussia’ rather than ‘Belarus’, but that is likely a bit of historical licence using the form of the name in use today for greater clarity.

[5] <http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/JoshWildingNewsAndReviews/news/?a=104669> Comics’ Bucky’s history isn’t all about ugly behaviour by Russians either, but in a different way. Comics Bucky was already an assassin before he was the Winter Soldier, and I’m sure Ed Brubaker knew exactly how disturbing it was to have the US Army training a boy in his mid-teens to be a cold-blooded killer. I don’t want to go into this in depth, because I’m not American and I certainly don’t want to give the idea I think America is the only Western power that did some horrible things in the Cold War, but the theme of dirty US secrets is emphasised enough it can’t be overlooked when talking about how and why MCU Winter Soldier’s backstory differs from the comics.


End file.
